If I were Square Enix, and I were planning a promotion for Deus Ex 3, I might just avoid something where I ask gamers to unlock the results. Just for a couple more weeks, maybe. But that’s what’s happening with a campaign to “unlock exclusive content via Facebook”. But apparently rather than employing the techniques of Chippy1337, we’re supposed to do this by “liking” the game, whatever the bloody hell that means. Are they really so desperate for approval? It’s a “slew of assets” that will become available – 90 of them apparently – when an unnamed number of “likes” are achieved. Guh. Let me tell you something…

Assets are not a gift. Assets are promotional material. They are adverts. They provide potential customers with images and videos of a forthcoming game, with the aim of encouraging them to buy the product. They are not a special treat if you’re good, nor the prize at the end of a competition.

This is like Coca Cola saying that if people will only send them enough postcards they’ll allow them to watch their next advert for Coke. It’s insanity.

Eidos Montreal’s community manager, Kyle Stallock, explains,

“Deus Ex has one of the most passionate, vocal and dedicated communities in all of video games, so offering a program that rewards that loyalty — even before the game is released — is a great way for us to give something back. The Facebook community now has significant control over the release schedule for some of our favorite assets. We have a ton of surprises and unlockables planned, so fans should invite their friends to ‘Like’ the page and start collecting these rewards.”

RELEASING ADVERTS IS NOT REWARDING LOYALTY! ARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!

It’s already insane enough that every single lunatic publisher in this ridiculous industry signs exclusive deals with magazines or websites to allow them to promote their sodding game, while punishing any other magazine or website who might dare to offer them FREE ADVERTISING. But making this content – stuff everyone just wants to look at, not complete a sponsored swim for – the goal for the community has made a blood vessel pop in my brainium.

You can [grimace] keep track of the “progress” by following this site. Or presumably someone else will just hack the site and take it.

Interestingly (and unrelated) my gf came back from the weekend away asking me if I knew about a game called The Brink that she had seen on telly that looked good.
When gf is asking me about games, and having her interest piqued (she does not know it is a brutal multi-player game) then some marketing must be getting done right.

Just delete the cookie they gave you and you can re-enter your age. Seriously, though. Those pick your age things are just stupid. I’m sure there’s no reason to them, it’s not like a 5 or 10 year old can’t pick out an 18+ date and it just provides a hassle for the rest of us.

A button saying “Are you over 18?” would be easier to click through, but here’s a radical suggestion, just don’t try and gate your content away from children when you can’t possibly do that.

I’d like to know what law that is. There are plenty of sites with much more “inappropriate” material for young children that have simple buttons. I suspect strongly that this is just lawyering arse-covering (like most of those unenforceable, ridiculous EULAs that we all have to agree to).

Far more obnoxious is Steam’s age check. Look I’m already signed in, can’t I just set my birthdate in my profile or something so I don’t have to jump through those ridiculous hoops every time I want to buy a game that uses the F word?

An age check is generally put in place as an effort to be able to evidence that they’re making some effort to comply with (a) child protection legislation that may be in operation in various countries/states, and (b) classification advertising legislation or guidelines (depending on where you live).

Of course there’s many sites that consider a simpler question and button sufficient (obviously doesn’t provide any less effectiveness), while others rely on disclaimers / terms and conditions or may be hosted in countries that really don’t care less.

The ridiculous thing is that an age check is deemed by some legislation or guidelines as being sufficient protection as if children won’t lie about their age on the internet, while at the same time trying to protect said children from predatory adults who are acknowledged as lying about themselves online.

If the PC Gamer (UK) folks are anything to go by, they’ve done just that.

I was very skeptical about Deus Ex 3 until I heard them raving about it on the podcast. They’re very happy with the bits they’ve played, and they generally have quite good taste. (That is, they agree with *me* on almost everything.)

Anyway, I think this Facebook crap is just a fad that will die down. It’s a scummy way to force a really weak version of word-of-mouth advertising. It’s just sad to see the likes of Blizzard as pioneers of this method.

I wouldn’t count on it to die down man. History has shown that in marketing, every communication advancement discovered or invented has to be met with an equal evolution of advertising for it.

Consider print media, radio, phones, television and the internet begat print ads, “conversation ads” (think of those radio ads you hear in the car where two people have a conversation, one convincing the other of something product/service related), telemarketing, commercial endorsements and pop-up ads and you’ll begin to see that informing a million people people of a product that costs $1 for a shot at making $500,000 is always a priority whenever an information medium is discovered.

Marketing professionals live in the real world too. If they didn’t embrace these asinine shenanigans for market mining using that new-fangled Facebook tube, they’d look pretty incompetent to their bosses.

Sorry, Kaira, I’m with Mr Walker on this. Making us beg and work to be showered with advert/promo material is just perverse (as it is for Valve’s oh-so-clever ARGs….) A “nice way to interact with the community”? No, it’s just looking for people to sign up to an advert [drip]-feed. Madness = yours.

Well, I don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with this, though I can see why someone would not appreciate these kinds of publicity stunts/advert campaigns/whatchamacallits. It’s a way to make the community involved in the game, making them (me? us? who?) feel as if they are contributing to something, making them feel special. But, well, basically, YMMV.

I’ve seen Bioware and Ubi do this for Dragon Age and Assassin’s Creed, both of which I love, and not once did I feel I was ‘special’ because they gave me ‘control’ over when the trailer/picture/random information was supposed to release. I felt like a tool.

They can do what they did for the Dragon Age 2 demo download promotion thing, which is, keep a counter up and running to count number of installed demos, have the counter actually display number of downloads, add and subtract willy-nilly and magically shoot it over the minimum the night before the deadline.

I don’t understand why we’re seeing this blitz of media promotion when the game’s launch is still three months out. It’s like they pushed back the launch date without tweaking the promotional time tables to account for it.

Why is this even getting the time of day from you Mr. Walker? I mean, if you hate it so much, why are you doing them a favour by posting about it? Is it simply to expose what you feel to be the madness of it?

Devs and publishers increasingly acknowledge RPS as that one and only PC gaming site with a readership of several potential customers. If a severe rant is published, you can be sure that people at Square Enix will read it and won’t be happy. If they’re stupid (which is most likely), they’ll just like RPS less. If they’re not, they might tone down their future advertising campaigns.

Wait why? The guys found a way to doubly “cash in” on marketing assets, have their own ARG and have a Facebook Game (click on button, counter goes up) with a game that’s not even in Facebook, with ZERO budget, and you *critizice* them?? This people are ACE!!

Just look whnat you’ve made me go and do! I’ve just ‘Liked’ it, bite me! (Shitting Krickey, I can’t belive I just said that) Ooooh I forgot to say Fuck you Facebook I wouldn’t want anybody think I’m not cool being on it! :p

I use Facebook. I enjoy Facebook. I am also cool, bordering on awesome, and care not what others think about any aspect of that. Damned hipsters; go and react against something else that lots of other people like, will you? Bit fed up hearing people proclaiming their Facebook shunnage as some kind of honour badge.

I’m sorry, you cannot access this site, it appears you will not be born for 16 years.

On another note:

Assets are not a gift. Assets are promotional material. They are adverts. They provide potential customers with images and videos of a forthcoming game, with the aim of encouraging them to buy the product. They are not a special treat if you’re good, nor the prize at the end of a competition.

Thank you. This new “OMG like me on facebook!1!!” type of marketing platform is annoying enough without them promising to reward us with more advertsing.

It’s a pretty perfect marketing scheme, I think. The fans who were at least interested in it anyway (and thus didn’t need advertising to) essentially crowdsource more free advertising for Eidos by exposing the DX3 page to all their friends. I don’t really have a problem with it, apart from the ridiculous spin people like Stallock put on it. And, of course, this whole “announcement of an announcement” thing. Not sure why it would matter to us folks, though – just be patient and buy the game after you’ve read a few reviews from people that share your taste.

EDIT: And played the demo, ofc. And to be a bit of a dick: Mr Walker, it’s only a problem if you guys actually report on it! Yes, it’s insanely annoying but the best way to overcome annoyance is to ignore.

Yeah, it’d be pretty terrible if you put some serious effort into an ARG like that and all you got was to be flown to the game’s launch party by the developers, or if you didn’t make that cut, ended up with their entire back catalog as a prize.

Anyway, the game did come out early. I got to play it a day early because of the timezone I’m in. Although I can see why, if you’d spent money on games that you didn’t want, and then spent days playing games that you didn’t like, all because you had concocted in your mind an implied promise that doing this would make the game come out almost a week earlier than scheduled, that you’d be upset.

Companies can advertise, that’s fine. I advertise, and I think advertising can be perfectly ethical if you follow the unwritten rules. One of the big rules, to my mind, is that you admit when you are advertising. I am close to stopping buying new Scientist (for example) because they have 2 page adverts laid out to look like NS articles. That’s a con, it’s insulting and it’s dishonest.

This is similarly insulting, because its treating the customer like a mug. The whole point of advertising is that you WANT people to see it. Pretending that advertising is somehow a ‘reward’ is bullshit.
It’s trying to get you to ‘like’ the game as a free way to spam all your facebook friends with the name of the game. it reminds me of those competitions when companies pretend they need a new motto and want you to suggest it, whereas they just want thousands of mugs to write down how great the product is so their brain starts to believe it.

But the WORST thing about this, is it’s so annoying it’s meant that me CLIFFSKI, is here AGREEING with JOHN WALKER. How can this happen? *Shakes Fist*
:D

Yeah, because putting a banner on a website is the exact same thing as pretending that banner will be a “reward” that you will have the “privilege” of seeing if you Like the game on Facebook, essentially advertising the game to the people you’re friends with.

Kyle Stallock here. As the post said, I’m the community manager at Eidos-Montreal.

I’d like to clarify that none of the materials I’ve secured for this were going to be released. It’s all new content, and I’ve personally tried to tailor it all to the community. If you want, think of it like material that you’d normally find on a special edition version of a game, only this won’t cost any money.

For those that are opposed to the idea, I hope the quality of releases can change your mind.

This won’t cost any money, no payments from cards per se, but I bet all that Facebook advertising ‘benefit’ is nice. :) Free lunch? Not a great believer in it, Kyle.

Also, “asset” is a bit vague, isn’t it? that could mean anything from a slab of wall texture to a crop of innovative screensavers. I’d prefer the latter, obviously, but the lexical choice gives me pause. Concept art? Meh.

You haven’t specified what you mean by “content” though, Kyle! If it’s in-game stuff (say an extra NPC, or a new gun, or whatever), then that’s allright.

But the wording you use might just mean useless promotional shite like trailers or concept art, and I think it’s rather insulting to ask your community to do something for you (giving you hundreds of thousands of “Likes” on Facebook, which will no doubt help promote the game), and in return you reward them with advertising! I think that’s what John thought you meant which is why he was upset in his post, and I would be too.

Promotional material is something you should be BEGGING people to see, cause it’ll sell the game to them! You spend substantial amounts of money sticking posters on the side of buses, and embedding trailers on popular websites like this one. So why do you assume that a potential customer might actually want to do WORK (even if it’s something as small as liking your FB page) for the privilege of seeing your advertising?

Remember Year Zero, which started as a few USB keys dropped at Nine Inch Nails concerts, featuring MP3s with hidden messages and creepy images in the audio spectrogram? They created an entire fleshed-out backstory to their near-future world, and it was fantastic. It vastly increased my appreciation of the album. It functioned as hype-building advertising, but it was also quite an experience in itself.

Berzee: Well, your response ‘seemed’ sarcastic and condescending, as a lot of stuff on the internet is. And because I assumed it was so, I didn’t appreciate you bagging on the poor man, who’s obviously just doing his job.

But, despite all of that, if you still wish to engage in swordplay with pointy food items, I recommend ice cream cones. With lots of ice cream.

“RELEASING ADVERTS IS NOT REWARDING LOYALTY! ARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!” doesn’t sound like the words of a man who approves of what he’s writing about. I’m sorry if i’ve misconstrued it, but your article gives off the impression that you aren’t to happy about this firm advertising their product, which perplexes me.

Am I missing something here? If one doesn’t like Facebook and one doesn’t like concept art, then surely simply ignoring the campaign does one no harm? It’s something that one cannot help but notice, like DRM or shoddy gameplay or bad porting.

My time is a precious commodity (though I mostly choose to fill it with reruns of Frasier), they won’t have much luck trying to make me work for advertisements. That’s not to say it won’t wash with the general gaming populace though. I was already laughing when gamers started shelling out hundred dollar bills for the privilege of owning a plastic model made exclusively in a Korean sweatshop.

The whole thing smacks of “marketing lemming” behavior, but it IS a more concrete way for someone in marketing to justify their existence/continued employment when they can just point to Facebook numbers instead of trying to assign a real ROI on traditional advertising.

This, a thousand times. I think that, at times like these, the best thing to do is take a step back and try to see the situation for what it really is: a whole crapload of advertising/marketing people, trying to justify their paychecks. Being a Lemming in marketing has never been so easy.

Seriously though, you’re right, every time I get offered “free” trailers or wallpapers or adverts or other useless shite like that, whether for signing up to a newsletter or for pre-ordering, I feel like a mug. This is marketting departments having gone off into such a tailspin that they’ve entered a spiral and disappeared up their own arse. I do hope they stay up there so that nobody ever has to listen to them again!

Is it possible, however, that in this case by “assets” they mean actual in-game assets? The word seems to imply in-game models and stuff for modders to use. If they’re really using the word “assets” to describe trailers and wallpapers then that’s just adding insult to injury – it’s confusing the product with the publicity! If I were the publishers I’d go down to the marketting department and smack them around a bit for being so lazy…

“Promotions on Facebook must be administered within Apps on Facebook.com, either on a Canvas Page or an app on a Page Tab. … You must not use Facebook features or functionality, such as the Like button, as a voting mechanism for a promotion.” – Facebook Terms of Service.

Anyone who dislikes this promotion could probably put the kibosh on it just by complaining. Unless they’re administering it via a Facebook App.

What the? In-game ads? I thought you were making a joke, but sadly a little google proved not:

I also can’t finish up this preview without mentioning that during my time playing Human Revolution, I spotted an advertisement for McDonald’s Chicken McBites plastered across an overpass in the future city of Detroit. It was the Australian advertisement and everything, with Shane Warne’s face hidden behind a packet of chickeny goods, and labelled with the Australian price. When I went back again to take a screenshot, it had changed to an advertisement for Adidas sports instead, indicating that whatever server was up and running delivering these ads was already working quite well.

Liking something on facebook is free advertising. Each of your friends will see that you liked it so that’s advert shot number 1. Second, when you like something, you subscribe to that feed. So it’s not just advertising through users, but allowing them to advertise to those users directly. So it’s like pepsi saying “if you like pepsi, sign up to receive pepsi commercials! And to reward you for getting other people to subscribe to our commercials, we’re giving you MORE COMMERCIALS!

All that said, it’s crap. I don’t care about screen caps unlocking. I’m already sold on the game based on what RPS has said about it and what I’ve seen already. This might help get on the fence people over to the buying side of the fence. It’s still crap.

I’d like to know how effective these Facebook campaigns really are, and how well they translate to sales. Even if it does make them a few more sales, I think it takes an awfully lazy PR person/team to do something shit like this. If they must go the facebook route, couldn’t they at least use some creativity and make an interesting page on their website with an embedded “like” button? Surely with the hacking and technological concepts within Deus Ex, they could make some kind of neat puzzle on their website for potential customers to play with and enjoy. Oh, and also offering a decent reward while they’re at it would be preferable.

Oh yeah, I get that side of it – but doing it in such a basic way (simply having to like their page, I gather) seems so pointless, and, like you say, it seems like a weird route to go with this game.

I might have been a bit hasty to imply all Facebook campaigns are worthless – I actually did temporarily sign up on Facebook when Polyphony ran a promo for GT5 that was actually really well done. You watched gameplay footage of a rally car racing around a track and had to click to take a picture at certain points (touting the game’s photo mode). The mini-game was a relatively fun distraction (although horrendously let down by the structure of Facebook) and you got a redeemable code for a decent car in the full game.